Fanny Hill Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Nancy K. Miller

Critical Essay by Nancy K. Miller

SOURCE: "A Harlot's Progress: II—Fanny Hill," in her The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782, Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. 51-66.

In the following excerpt, Miller argues that Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) can be interpreted as a female Bildungsroman in the tradition of other apprenticeship or coming-of-age novels popular in the eighteenth century.

Unlike La Vie de Marianne and Moll Flanders, where prefatory material provides a summary of the story to come and the key to its mode d'emploi, Fanny Hill offers the reader no more than a name and a suggestive subtitle: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.¹ Consequently, as narrator, Fanny herself must account for the authenticity of her text. And so she begins with what one might call the standard operating procedures of the fictional memoir. Just as Marianne writes to a female friend "dont le nom est en...
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